[Ailist] Capturing impact and raising visibility of 'unseen' work

Wed Jan 7 13:22:23 MST 2009

Dear Marvin and Colleagues: I may have written this before, so mea culpa if
this is a repeat. There's a book in the pipeline on AI Valuation, based on
the idea that AI is a cyclical rather than linear process, so asking the
usual AI questions works: "What are the best things that have happened since
we began this program?", for example, that gives you stories about impact.
If your clients need hard data, there are now computer programs that can
turn the stories (qualitative data) into quantitative data. 

One of our jobs as AI practitioners is to help our clients understand the
fragile nature of data in human systems. If you ask a group of people a set
of questions one morning about human behavior in the system, by the end of
the day, the data set will be different. We socially construct our data and
the messages depend on the situation, the questions, the questioner, and on
and on. I remember back in the Carter administration when I was the OD
person on Sam Browns staff in the Action Agency (Peace Corps, Vista, etc.)
and we inherited a mega expensive computer program to "evaluate" peace corps
activities and volunteers. It was a total "ah-ha" for me, the math major! By
the time the program ran (and it cost mega thousands to collect and collate
the data, computers being what they were way back then) the data was
useless. (I suddenly realized that it didn't really matter how many people
attended a training event unless you really believed that "attending" was
data about the success of the program. We were busy counting such things in
those days. 

In the early 90's during my time at Cambridge, two colleagues and I (all of
us worked with International Development organizations as consultants)
created an AI process to use for "valuations" of development programs. Once
we played around with that idea, we realized that there were other processes
being created that followed the same notion -- such as "asset based
research" and "people-focused assessment using stories", etc. It was during
this time that I came to realize that these new processes were aligned with
the relational nature of African and Asian cultures who were not comfortable
focusing on other people's "mistakes." All of which is to say that this is a
subject close to my heart and, I believe, at the very forefront of this
transformation process that we in the AI community are helping to create in
the world. 

When Barnard and I did that first application of an AI Valuation process in
a corporation at SmithKlineBeecham (there's an article written by us and our
clients about it on the Commons I think or I can find a copy), we had no
idea how it would work in such mega-systems. When we were done, the Exec
team announced that they had never seen such valuable data. What they got,
of course, was what their people loved most about working for them. And the
usual thing happened -- they got more of what they looked for.

I usually say that if your client wants it, you probably should try to do
something. But I also believe that we need to weigh carefully if we are
living into our Social Constructionist values when we reinforce Newtonian
notions about human systems. I suspect we are all on the same page and
struggling together to find ways to cross this great divide without seeming
smug and dichotomous! So I'd love to hear how some of you are handling this
idea of "evaluation" in an AI process.

And HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all. I'm so steeped in this AI stuff that I truly
believe we had to get into this dreadful morass in our country and the world
for people to let our leaders take us into the future. May we all live long
enough to see it!!!   

Hugs, Jane

Jane Magruder Watkins & Ralph Kelly
Appreciative Inquiry Unlimited
An Organization Development Center for Teaching, Consulting and Mentoring

Office & Home
233A Woodmere Drive
Williamsburg, VA 23185
(757) 259-9942

MarshHaven Retreat Center
P.O. Box 541
1702 Wheat Patch Road
Belhaven, NC 27810
(252) 964-3072 

www.appreciativeinquiryunlimited.com

Appreciative Inquiry: Change at the Speed of Imagination by Jane Magruder
Watkins & Bernard Mohr can be ordered from Amazon.com or JosseyBassWiley

-----Original Message-----
From: ailist-bounces at lists.business.utah.edu
[mailto:ailist-bounces at lists.business.utah.edu] On Behalf Of 'Marvin Faure'
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 10:25 AM
To: ailist at lists.business.utah.edu
Subject: [Ailist] Capturing impact and raising visibility of 'unseen' work

Dear Kate,

In response to your post:

“The management question is: We have invested significantly in catalysis,
how do we measure the impact? The question asks how we can clearly
demonstrate to the rest of the organisation the value and impact of having
dedicated teams of catalysts within the functions.

We are looking at an appreciative framework for this purpose, including a
full 4D Inquiry later this year, and in the shorter terms, setting up
some dialogue mapping. Additionally, I am very interested in hearing
thoughts from the Ai community on this topic.”

My thoughts are that it may be helpful to have some quantitative data to
complement the qualitative data you plan to collect through the AI and
dialogue processes. Once organizations start asking OD to “prove” the value
they are adding, there’s really no alternative to gathering hard data to
complement the soft. We have found this approach helpful for our clients, on
two distinct levels:

1) Providing quantitative measures of the value provided by development
interventions provides a direct answer to the question “how much value are
we providing?” and should satisfy senior management’s request for “hard”
data.

2) Equally importantly, we believe that measuring the value actually
increases it, since it obliges people to think about what they learned and
what they are doing differently (thus encouraging them to do more of it).

We use a proprietary on-line system to measure the value of various OD
interventions including coaching, training, team events and change
management projects for our clients.

We also use the system to measure the value added by internal functions (HR,
IT, Finance
) in support of the organisation’s strategic initiatives.

As always, the key to success is as much in the questions asked as in the
overall system design. Doing this right can substantially increase the
profile and reputation of OD/Training and/or HR within the parent
organization.

I’d be happy to explore further if the idea seems interesting – let me know!

Kind regards,

Marvin FAURE
MINDSTORE
Chemin du Canal 5
CH-1260 Nyon
Switzerland
Tél. +41 22 363 9286
Mob. +41 786 826 926	
www.mindstore.ch

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